VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (letter).

A local legend is recalled in Travel story

June 16, 2003|By Chris Warren, President, Glenview Park District.

We were pleased to read the story about Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska (Travel, June 8). Your references about explorer Robert Kennicott, the town of Kennecott, the Kennecott copper mine and the Kennecott Glacier were of particular interest to those of us in Glenview, the town where the family homestead is preserved as a National Historic Landmark. The very same person whom those locations are named after was a Glenview resident in the mid-1800s, Robert Kennicott (the name is spelled differently than the sites because of an error in the times they were named). Kennicott grew up with his family in the Kennicott Grove (now 1421 Milwaukee Ave.) and was the Smithsonian Institution's main Western naturalist. The Grove, where he discovered and sent back more than 10,000 plant and animal species to the Smithsonian, is today part of Illinois' nature preserve system owned and operated by the Glenview Park District.

Kennicott's father, John, was the first physician in the Glenview area and was famous in his own right. Two of the many things he did were to begin the Illinois State Fair, and to be the primary promoter of the Land Grant College Act passed by Congress. Robert Kennicott, meanwhile, became famous in Alaska because of his expeditionary trips with other noted scientists on behalf of the U.S. government, which eventually led the secretary of state, William H. Seward, and President Abraham Lincoln to persuade Congress to purchase Alaska from Russia. Robert Kennicott also established the Chicago Academy of Science.

The Grove displays some of the things from Robert Kennicott's early travels in Alaska. The Glenview Park District is proud to have saved the Grove, working with a grass-roots community organization in 1973 that launched a public campaign and passed a referendum to acquire what is now a 123-acre nature center.